She scrubbed harder, skin flushing around the mark. The scent lifted under the soap, muted but still there beneath it, salt and green crush and that warm resinous note that had long since sunk into Mavrek's hands and evidently had no intention of leaving hers at first request.
She heard Mavrek enter behind her before she turned, the workshop floor taking his weight in the now familiar language of boards and rope.
He did not ask what she was doing. That would have been offensive, given the vigor of the scrubbing.
He crossed to the rack by the rear wall, set down a coil of line, and paused. She could feel his attention on the back of her neck, then on the arm she was pretending to clean for purely hygienic reasons.
Iva looked up despite herself.
His gaze met hers in the little basin mirror nailed crooked above the slats. Brief. Exact. No amusement in it. No apology. He saw the reddened skin, the fading amber, the cloth working back and forth too long over too small a mark, and he chose not to speak into it.
Then he looked away, took the second crate of brushes from the shelf, and left by the side door with the same unhurried tread he'd brought in.
Iva stared at the empty doorway another moment, then returned to the basin and rinsed her arm one final time. The water clouded with soap. The amber smear was nearly gone. Nearly.
The faint warmth remained, or else the skin had learned it and would not stop reporting.
That nightin her rented room the boards held the day's heat under her bare feet and the festival noises from farther in the settlement drifted up softened by distance. Hammering from the island platform. Someone singing while pots were washed. A ferry rope thudding against wood with the tide's pull.
Iva sat on the edge of the narrow bed with her sleeve pushed up and looked at the forearm that no longer showed much but still smelled very slightly unlike her own soap.
Then she closed her eyes and filed the beauty.
Not him. That would have been intolerable.
The light. Late-afternoon gold on the repaired section of the navigation panel, caught at the exact moment the thinned binder settled and the damaged paint surface briefly forgot it had ever been broken. The split hull line drawn whole again. The green-black water turning deep and lucid. The inscription band below it emerging one stroke at a time out of ruin.
She kept such moments. Privately, greedily, with the same secrecy other women might reserve for letters or lovers.
And yet the oil on her arm came from that same afternoon, from the same plank, from the same man standing too close while the wall's old disaster opened its teeth in her memory. She could not put the beauty in one file and the warmth in another without lying to herself, and she was tired enough tonight to recognize a lie by its workmanship.
She lay down and tucked the arm beneath her pillow as if pressure could force the last of the scent out.
It did not. And morning, she knew with sudden ugly clarity, would read whatever the soap had failed to kill.
5
THE REEF FLAT
The reef flat was the most visible place in Brineshell, and Iva had agreed to go there for professional reasons only.
She repeated that to herself twice while following Mavrek down the last stone steps beyond the workshop and out onto the exposed white-green spread of low tide, because repetition was how one kept weak arguments upright. The flats shone under the morning sun like something skinned and left open. No wall. No scaffold. No workshop shadow with its tolerable partial concealment.
Just shelves of wet reef running toward the central island, tide pools bright as split glass, and sky so wide it seemed personally rude. The half-built claim platform sat visible from nearly every dry inch of the settlement, which did nothing helpful to the quality of her breathing.
Fetch was already out there with two mineral baskets and a hooked pole, red-brown against all that glare and grinning as if exposure were a civic virtue.
"Sorrel," he called. "Welcome to the least discreet place in the reaches."
"Comforting," she said.
"I aim to provide orientation."
Mavrek, beside her, said only, "Mind the dark seams. They are deeper than they look."
She stepped onto the reef and felt at once how badly her body preferred boards underfoot. Stone shifted from slick to rough without warning. Tiny channels cut narrow mouths through the mineral surface and disappeared under reflective water. The whole exposed plain smelled of salt heat, trapped weed, and the old calcareous breath of the reef itself. Beautiful in a way she would never have chosen socially and could not help responding to professionally.
Pigment deposits glinted in seams and pockets. Shell ash lay pale in dry bowls. A blue-gray mineral crusted one tide pool rim in a line fine enough to make her hand itch for sample bags.